A Rare Agreement on Climate Rules

With most of President Obama’s efforts to combat climate change tied up in litigation, it is heartening, if not downright astonishing, to see an industry targeted by an aggressive rule to reduce greenhouse gases welcoming that rule. It is also heartening to be able to provide proof to a reflexively hostile Congress — whose members yap incessantly about “job-killing regulations” and “executive overreach” — that regulators and industry can, in fact, produce a mutually acceptable result.

The rule, announced last week by the Environmental Protection Agency, imposes tough new fuel economy standards on the 18-wheelers, buses, delivery trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles that make up only 5 percent of the vehicles on the road but account for 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions of the transportation sector.

The rule completes a suite of ambitious standards that, over time, are expected to deliver not only cleaner big rigs but also cars and S.U.V.s with double the fuel efficiency of current models. Collectively, these standards are an indispensable element of President Obama’s effort to meet his commitment at the December 2015 climate summit meeting in Paris to reduce America’s carbon dioxide emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

There are aspects of this agreement worth celebrating besides its positive effect on the planet. One is the trucking industry’s thumbs up — a rare departure from the legal blitzkrieg that has greeted most of the administration’s other efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Industry groups and 27 states have joined in a lawsuit against an important new rule that would limit carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants; oil and gas interests, with 15 states, have filed suits against a rule that would reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from oil and natural gas operations.

In this case, industry looked beyond the technological hurdles and saw benefits, the main one being that the $12,000 per vehicle cost of upgrading the fleet would be more than outweighed by projected fuel savings of $170 billion over 10 to 12 years. And executives knew it was long past time to upgrade a category of vehicles that average a minuscule six miles a gallon.

Even so, the final agreement took over a year of hard work and many meetings among all the stakeholders, including federal officials, fleet owners, truck manufacturers and environmental organizations. What emerged was not the “executive overreach” the present Congress complains about. What emerged was something Congress itself had asked for in a bipartisan energy bill signed by President George W. Bush in 2007 — a suite of meaningful fuel economy standards that would reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and its contribution to global warming. The system worked as it was supposed to.